According to this morning's Financial Times, the seizure would be part of a government effort to get $17 million from Mr. Black and two other executives of his Hollinger International following their fraud convictions in June.

Mr. Black sold the apartment at 635 Park in late 2005.

So imagine our excitement so see that Richard Siklos had written a short piece about the Lady Black!

Sounds like good material for a book! And apparently in their home country of Canada, that's just what publishers are trying to get her to do.

[Some will remember that some time ago Lord Black had reportedly come close to buying this newspaper—and speculation was that Ms. Amiel, who is the owner of a vast couture wardrobe and of a pretty nice-sounding apartment on Fifth Avenue near our old East 64th Street headquarters, would run the Observer.]

However, in the mixed jury verdict, Black was acquitted of nine counts that included wire fraud and racketeering.

The former Hollinger chief once presided over an empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times, Toronto’s National Post, London’s Daily Telegraph, and Israel's Jerusalem Post.

Now, Black—convicted today of pocketing money that should have gone to stockholders—faces up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million.

Bloomberg reports:

The three co-defendants were former Hollinger executives Peter Atkinson and John Boultbee, and attorney Mark Kipnis.

• Bloomberg.com

Bravo's Tabloid Wars--that docu-reality-miniseries peek into Mort Zuckerman's Daily News ant farm--hits TVs July 24, the summer after it was filmed. Today brings the press kit, complete with a mock newspaper touting the series' many dramatic attractions ("Married gossip columnists George Rush and Joanna Malloy balance family life and work when their son's sudden injury leaves Rush to cover a Gotti family party solo"..."Columnist Lenore Skenazy scours the city for 'intriguing oddballs'").

The most excitement, though, comes from the back page roundup of the series' principal characters. Here's Michael Cooke, Editor-in-Chief--"Currently, Cooke is back in the windy city where he is vice president of editorial operations for the Chicago group of papers at Sun-Times parent company, Hollinger Inc." There's Hudson "Hud" Morgan, Junior Gossip Columnist To Lloyd Grove--"Morgan is currently an associate editor at Men's Vogue." Forget the real-life news-chasing story lines. Maybe Bravo shoulda just modeled the program on Survivor.

In court papers, Mr. Rose, 43, claims that Mr. Stephens orchestrated his termination with Lord Conrad Black’s former media company, Hollinger International, by intervening with executives in Chicago and New York in 2004 when the media empire controlled the Israeli daily.

Mr. Rose is also suing Mr. Stephens for defamation, citing as evidence a widely circulated and now infamous May 2004 memo that Mr. Stephens distributed to Post staffers following Mr. Rose’s termination last year.

The memo, which was e-mailed to Post staffers two days after Mr. Rose was fired and soon found its way onto the Internet, paints a vivid portrait of Mr. Stephens’ feelings about Mr. Rose:

“For those of us who have seen up close the damage Tom [Rose] did to this newspaper, this is a happy event indeed,” Mr. Stephens’ wrote of Mr. Rose’s dismissal. “For those Tom damaged personally, with his abusive behavior and bizarre management style, it is happier still. So good riddance, Tom, good riddance. You will not be missed ….

“So many of us have been waiting for this day, and fighting for it,” the memo continues, “that we may be forgiven for thinking that Tom’s departure brings our problems to an end. It does not. It will be some time before we can undo the damage he wrought: To our finances, to our reputation, to our business relationships, to our morale, to the quality of our editorial product …. What we can say is that, with Tom gone, we can begin to address our problems in a rational and purposeful way.”

“The content [of the memo] is demonstrably false,” Mr. Rose said by phone on Sept. 12 from Indianapolis, where he now lives. Mr. Rose said he hasn’t been able to secure a job since his dismissal from the Post, and his attorney Michael Hurst said that Mr. Stephens’ memo was seen by hundreds of thousands if not “millions” of people on the Internet, which entitles his client to compensation for the losses incurred from the memo’s statements.

“The distribution method was of malicious intent and design,” Mr. Rose said. “The consequence has been personally damaging.”

Mr. Stephens declined to comment and referred questions to his attorney, James Garvey. Mr. Garvey didn’t respond to calls and an e-mail seeking comment.

The lawsuit is the latest distress signal coming out of the embattled daily, whose recent history is marked by the corporate scandal, financial hardship and bitter acrimony of its former owner, Hollinger International.

In the past five years, the paper’s staff has been cut in half, and last year, Hollinger’s independent investigation into improprieties by Lord Black and his deputy, David Radler, found that the Post fell victim to their $400 million “corporate kleptocracy.” The report showed that a portion of the Post’s charity fund was appropriated to the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem for the Rona and David Radler Trauma Recovery Unit, while another $25,000 was donated to a business scholarship at Haifa University, which in turn, bestowed an honorary degree upon Mr. Radler in 2002.

Additionally, in 2003, at the same time the Post instituted an employee-wide 10 percent pay cut, Mr. Radler’s daughter Melissa, who served as the paper’s New York correspondent and worked from the offices of The New York Sun, received a raise that nearly doubled her $38,000 salary to $62,000, which came on top of a generous housing stipend; these benefits were not offered to other employees.

The Post is currently engulfed in no fewer than three lawsuits. This March, Mr. Rose filed a suit in Chicago against the Chicago Sun-Times, Hollinger, the Jerusalem Post and Mr. Stephens seeking unpaid severance benefits. The Chicago court dismissed Mr. Stephens as a defendant in that case, citing jurisdictional grounds. A $2 million suit against Mr. Stephens has since be refiled in New York, where he is on staff at The Wall Street Journal.

While Mr. Rose battles his former employers, the Post’s new owners have turned on each other as well. In December, Hollinger sold the Post for $13.2 million to a partnership between Israeli media titan Eli Azur of Tel Aviv–based M.T.L., and Canada’s biggest media firm, CanWest, run by media mogul Leonard Asper. The duo soon unraveled and are currently battling in New York Supreme Court over control of the paper.

Founded in 1932 as the only English-language daily published in Israel, the Jerusalem Post has secured a sphere of influence extending well beyond its weekday circulation of just over 11,000. In 1989, Lord Black purchased the paper for $20 million, and although it sagged financially, the Post became a flagship in Hollinger’s global fleet of newspapers, which also included the Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Telegraph in London. Under Lord Black, the Post operated as a conservative beachhead in the Middle East as he swung the paper’s historically centrist editorial position rightward. Under Hollinger’s ownership, the paper churned through eight editors as morale plummeted. In 1998, Mr. Radler, who was recently indicted on charges of illegally siphoning $32 million in payments from Hollinger, appointed Mr. Rose publisher. In April 2002, Mr. Rose hired Mr. Stephens, a 28-year-old neoconservative wunderkind, to edit the paper. Former staffers say Mr. Rose exhibited an abusive and erratic management style in his campaign to slash the Post’s costs. In addition to laying off employees, Mr. Rose terminated the Post’s long-standing printing contracts with outside publications that used the Post’s presses, including Israel’s Yellow Pages, which staffers said left the Post in a perilous financial state. At the same time, staffers said that Mr. Rose launched expensive business ventures, including running articles from The Wall Street Journal and building a radio station that broadcast conservative talking heads like G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, which contradicted his relentless cost-cutting dicta.

“It’s one thing to cut costs,” said Calev Ben-David, the Post’s former managing editor (now a director at the pro-Israel media group the Israel Project), speaking by phone last week. “It’s another thing to treat your co-workers with contempt. I think Tom Rose was despicable to the Post’s workers, and I’m not just talking about cost-cutting. I’m talking about his manner and treatment of people.”

Hirsh Goodman, a former Post vice president in charge of editorial operations, said he left the paper after a falling out with Mr. Rose in 2000.

“In general, he was an impossible person to work with,” said Mr. Goodman, who is now a senior fellow at the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

In one instance in the fall of 1999, Mr. Goodman said that he traveled to London, to Lord Black’s Kensington townhouse, after editors at the Post complained of Mr. Rose’s management. Upon returning to Jerusalem, Mr. Goodman said that Mr. Rose took him into his office and said, “The next time you go behind my back, I’ll tear your tongue out of your head!”

Mr. Rose denied these accounts in an interview with The Observer and said that he was hired by Hollinger to cut costs. If his management style drew ire from the staff, he argued, that was a result of the harsh realities of the business, and it shouldn’t be used as a measure of his success.

“My management style may or may not have been one designed to win the hearts and minds of everyone who worked at the Jerusalem Post,” Mr. Rose said. “That wasn’t my job. My job was to transform a dying business into one that was competitive. My tenure at the Post was anything but a failure, which was why the defamatory e-mail was so damaging to me. It transformed my tenure at the Post into a referendum on whether I was a popular guy. Certainly that’s not why I was hired.”

Mr. Stephens left the paper last year for a position on The Journal’s editorial board; a well-known neoconservative, as editor of the Post he made Paul Wolfowitz the newspaper’s 2003 “Man of the Year.” The Post’s current editor, David Horovitz, said that despite the ongoing legal entanglements and financial constraints, he is guiding a more inclusive Post forward.

“It offers incredible responsibility and opportunity for an editor,” he said.

Wenner Media may lack Condé Nast’s Frank Gehry glitz, but Jann Wenner is playing real-estate catch-up.

This summer, Mr. Wenner commissioned an office-wide renovation to spruce up the quarters of Us Weekly, Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, the first renovation since Mr. Wenner took the space in 1991.

According to a Wenner spokesperson, Mr. Wenner hired Studios Architecture, an international firm that remodeled MTV’s Times Square headquarters, for the job.

But according to a Wenner insider, the renovation work has dragged on past its Labor Day deadline. And now Mr. Wenner isn’t happy with Us Weekly’s mustard-hued paint job.

“Jann felt like it’s not working,” a Wenner source said. Mr. Wenner is discussing new color schemes for his most successful title, which include colors “squarely in the girl family,” according to a Wenner source who is briefed on the renovation.

Along with paint, new brown carpet was put down throughout the offices. Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone received area rugs in varying color splashes that brightened the floor’s dark shade. Later this fall, Us Weekly is set to get a plasma TV in its conference room along with new chairs, a source said.

But in the northeast corner of Wenner’s second-floor offices, workers have walled in an area where the Men’s Journal gear closet and Us Weekly I.T. department were previously located.

One staffer speculated that it could house Mr. Wenner’s forthcoming women’s weekly magazine, planned for a launch next summer. A Wenner spokesperson said the space would be used for Men’s Journal photo and design staffers.

—Gabriel Sherman

Editors’ letters in the front of magazines, normally the place for an editor to ramble about a pet chow or prom-date memories, rarely feature rebukes of staffers.

But in October’s Lucky, editor Kim France writes about beauty director Jean Godfrey-June’s flailing attempts to apply Ms. France’s makeup during a frantic photo shoot for her editor’s picture.

“At first she messed up the brows,” Ms. France wrote in the caption below her editor’s photo; then, “she said in a panic, ‘I’m not a makeup artist, I’m a writer by trade!’” Ms. France concluded the caption: “Quit your day job, and you’re dead, Jean.”

More proof that writing about products and using them are two entirely different things.

“She had some new products in, and one of them she hadn’t tried before,” Ms. France said by phone on Sept. 13 of Ms. Godfrey-June’s beauty skills. “Sometimes you get Joan Crawford eyebrows if you don’t brush it off.”

Ms. France said she recited the caption to Ms. Godfrey-June before the page went to press. And she stressed that she wouldn’t allow Ms. Godfrey-June to abandon her editing duties for the beauty world.

“If Jean quit her day job and became a makeup artist professionally,” Ms. France said, “then she would be a dead woman.”

Ms. Godfrey-June was out of the office and not available for comment by press time.

—G.S.

New York Times pundit standings, Sept. 6-12:

1. Maureen Dowd, score 33.5 [rank last week: 4th]

2. Bob Herbert, 18.0 [5th]

3. Paul Krugman, 16.5 [tie-1st]

4. Thomas L. Friedman, 12.5 [no rank]

5. Nicholas D. Kristof, 9.5 [no rank]

6. John Tierney, 6.0 [6th]

7. David Brooks, 4.5 [3rd]

On Monday, Sept. 19, The New York Times is due to erect the TimesSelect pay wall on its Web site, charging readers for the privilege of seeing the opinion pages. In this last full week of free access, the Most E-Mailed standings say that is either a brilliant business decision or a terrible one: The columnists dominated the list, grabbing 13 of the top 25 spots. Thanks to ongoing public enthusiasm for Hurricane Katrina opinions, four columns were held over from the previous week, providing an unprecedented number of bonus points—particularly for Maureen Dowd, who ran away with first place this week.

But what will become of the pundit standings next week? Will there even be a Most E-Mailed list after the pay wall goes up to restrict the pundits’ readership?

Indeed there will be, said Times Web overboss Jon Landman. “It’ll be the same thing,” Mr. Landman said. “Presumably the contents will change, but if it doesn’t, that would be really good.”

Depending on how fast TimesSelect catches on, this may or may not be the End Times for the Times Op-Ed crew. But there is at least one ominous portent: This week, John Tierney broke out of last place—a sight as unnatural as a tide of blood. Close the shutters and tremble, ye pundits! The Four Horsemen are saddling up!

—Tom Scocca

Many commentators have declared that both men took full advantage of the opportunity offered them, with Mr. Giuliani getting the edge over Mr. Pataki, apparently because pundits believe chest-thumping exploitation is preferable to bland rambling. Perhaps it is. But lost, unaccountably, in all of this was Senator John McCain's eloquent, thoughtful and-most of all-civil speech on Day 1 of the convention. For our money, the Arizona Senator acquitted himself extremely well in showing that it is possible to be partisan without being nutty, passionate without being crude, and patriotic without being arrogant.

It took no small bit of courage for Senator McCain to point out that defeating our enemies will require the constancy and fortitude of all Americans-not just Republicans. Many other speakers seemed to argue otherwise, that only a Republican can be trusted with our safety. Indeed, that was the implicit message of one of Mr. Giuliani's many exploitative 9/11 anecdotes. He told the nation that at some point on that terrible day, he turned to then–Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said, "Thank God George Bush is our President." This suspiciously self-serving story tells us something about Mr. Giuliani, not Mr. Bush. Did he really believe, as the horror unfolded in front of him, that only George W. Bush would know how to respond? And if he really did utter these curious sentiments, what evidence would have led him to such a conclusion-Mr. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard? We just don't believe those lines. Does Mr. Giuliani really think that only Mr. Bush-and not, say, Al Gore-would have gone after the perpetrators of this atrocity? What drivel. Likewise Mr. Giuliani's implicit likening of Mr. Bush to Winston Churchill, a man who saw the evil of Nazism long before his colleagues. What warnings did George W. Bush deliver about militant Islam before Sept. 11? Unfortunately, Mr. Giuliani came across more as stand-up comic than statesman.

As for Mr. Pataki, his speech was thankfully devoid of Mr. Giuliani's bluster and lame attempts at wit. Unfortunately, it also was devoid of anything resembling content. It was a collection of mind-dulling platitudes, most of them about Sept. 11-it was shameful to see the leaders of a wounded city so willing to exploit their constituents' sorrow. The Governor has made a virtue out of being bland. But what works in Albany clearly does not work on the national stage.

Senator McCain, by contrast, served himself, his party and his country by reaching out beyond mere partisan politics to point out that we are all in this together, that we are engaged in a conflict we'd rather avoid, but simply can't. The Senator did not exploit tragedy, and did not suggest that his partisan opponents were somehow unpatriotic and/or incapable of defending the nation's interests.

He made his point: that he believes George W. Bush is the right man for the job. In doing so, however, he did not belittle those who might disagree.

As Rudy Giuliani might say, thank God for John McCain.

Conrad Black: Where Are The Criminal Indictments?

When Lord Conrad Black published his gassy, pretentious, 1,280-page biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt last year, he probably never guessed that he himself would soon be the subject of a far more readable tome, one coming in at a mere 513 pages but not lacking for high drama. A special committee of new board members of Hollinger International, the newspaper conglomerate from which Lord Black resigned as chief executive last fall, has issued an internal report accusing the blustering press lord and his sidekick, former Hollinger president F. David Radler, of presiding over a "corporate kleptocracy" in which the two men looted the company of $400 million-or 95 percent of the company's net income-between 1996 and 2003.

The report, prepared by former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Richard C. Breeden and part of a shareholder lawsuit seeking to recover $1.25 billion from Lord Black and others, notes: "At Hollinger, Black as both C.E.O. and controlling shareholder, together with his associates, created an entity in which ethical corruption was a defining characteristic of the leadership team." In addition, "Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described 'proprietors,' Black and Radler made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise." The report also concludes that Hollinger's chichi board-which included Henry Kissinger and right-wing former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle-"functioned more like a social club" and was largely "ineffective and careless" when it came to stopping Lord Black's sleazy doings. Mr. Perle, who also ran Hollinger's Internet subsidiary, receives special mention for having allegedly scooped up $5 million in questionable fees. Now Mr. Perle is claiming that he, too, was duped by Lord Black, his former pal, who, we now learn, regarded him with disdain. In e-mails to top Hollinger executives, Lord Black wrote that he was "well-aware of what a trimmer and a sharper Richard is at times." But who's the trimmer and the sharper? Lord Black makes Mr. Perle look like a neophyte in the trimming and sharping department.

The new report will likely be read with great interest over at the S.E.C. and the U.S. Attorney's office, both of which are conducting investigations into Lord Black's previously reported shenanigans. The report casts new light on Lord Black's Hollinger-financed shopping spree: $23 million spent on leasing planes "indiscriminately" to fly Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, to their various homes; $3 million to buy the couple a co-op on Park Avenue; $90,000 to spruce up Lord Black's Rolls-Royce; $42,870 for a birthday party at La Grenouille for Lady Black; $28,480 for three dinners for Henry and Nancy Kissinger. And then there's the $1.1 million salary which Lady Black collected for doing, well, nothing.

The Blacks also used company cash in an attempt to grease their way into New York's charity world. Lord Black dipped into Hollinger's coffers to pledge $283,000 to the Metropolitan Opera; $100,000 to the New York Public Library; $40,000 to the Museum of Modern Art; $15,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Benefit; and $20,000 to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Gala. All worthy causes, yet Hollinger received scant credit; instead, Lord and Lady Black reaped the attention, as a plaque honoring them went up at the Metropolitan Opera and the Public Library asked them to serve as chairman and chairwoman of a Literary Lions dinner. Similar shameless striving is what brought Lord Black his dubious British peerage: After buying London's Daily Telegraph , he became a member of the House of Lords. New Yorkers can be grateful that Lord and Lady Black's ascendancy on this side of the pond has been effectively squelched by the steady stream of unsavory revelations.

When it comes to Conrad Black, we have only one question: Where are the criminal indictments?

As The Wall Street Journal documented on its front page last week, Lord Black's stewardship of Hollinger was remarkable for the number of schemes he cooked up that enriched himself and colleagues at the expense of Hollinger shareholders. Many of these deals involved the array of small newspapers which Hollinger owned. As The Journal reports:

· In 1998, the debt-ridden Hollinger wanted to sell 18 community newspapers; a group led by Hollinger executives wanted to form a new company to buy them but didn't have enough cash. Lord Black and his chief operating officer, David Radler, decided to take equity stakes in the new company, Horizon Publishing. Lord Black was thus on both sides of the deal. Hollinger further loaned Horizon $8 million to complete the transaction, thereby increasing Hollinger's debt when it was telling shareholders that it was selling the papers to reduce its debt.

· In 2000, Hollinger sold three newspapers to Bradford Publishing Co. for $38 million. Lord Black and Mr. Radler apparently had their routine down by now: They bought equity in Bradford, and Hollinger gave Bradford a $6 million de facto loan.

· In 2001, Hollinger sold the Mammoth Times , a California paper it had bought in 1999 for $1.75 million, for $1 to Horizon, owned and controlled by Lord Black and Mr. Radler. Why did Hollinger's board agree to sell the paper for $1? They were told that the paper was losing money and there were no other interested buyers. But the Mammoth Times had actually been profitable, and earned $119,700 in the month after the deal closed. Another buyer had been so interested in purchasing the paper that he'd signed a letter of intent to buy it for $1.25 million. But these details were kept from the Hollinger board, and Lord Black was able to effectively sell himself his own paper and collect the paper's profits after the sale. The Journal notes that at least two other deals in which Hollinger sold papers to Horizon for $1 are under investigation.

Lord Black never seemed too concerned about the well-being of the company's shareholders. After all, he spent $8 million of company money to acquire the Franklin Roosevelt papers-research materials for his unreadable, blustering, 1,280-page biography of Roosevelt-and he spread Hollinger cash around to pals like Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley Jr., George Will and Richard Perle.

Indeed, it seems as if Lord Black woke up every morning thinking of some new way to rip off Hollinger shareholders. Not only did he and Mr. Radler personally collect $43 million over three years in "non-compete" payments when Hollinger sold assets, but The Journal reports that in at least one case involving a non-compete payment of $1.2 million, he was effectively agreeing not to compete with himself.

While it will take months for the S.E.C. and an internal Hollinger committee to dig to the depths of Lord Black's activities, there's actually not much to debate: If the allegations are correct, he basically stole $200 million from a public company. Does that make him a crook?

Some of Lord Black's friends would probably say no. William F. Buckley, who collected about $200,000 from Hollinger for attending advisory-board meetings, wrote in a recent letter to The Observer that Mr. Black is "extraordinarily learned, profoundly instructed, modest in demeanor, eloquent in speech and in kindnesses." And in a column he wrote for The National Review in 2002, Mr. Buckley wrote that Lord Black was among his "five closest friends in the world." We'd like to know who his other four closest friends are, so we can keep our hands in our pockets when we meet them.

Charlie Rangel: Class and Integrity

Presidential pretender Al Sharpton, who is traveling around the country in style courtesy of his misguided financial supporters, is angry with Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel. The Congressman, you see, has refused to go along with Mr. Sharpton's sham campaign; instead, he's supporting Wesley Clark. Mr. Sharpton clearly believes that as an African-American, Mr. Rangel owes him his vote. That sort of racially charged knee-jerk thinking is about what one would expect from Mr. Sharpton.

As befitting a corrupt political boss, Mr. Sharpton has vowed to get even: The righteous reverend is telling people that he'll support a primary challenge to Congressman Rangel from State Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV.

Mr. Powell is the son of the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose antics in Congress in the 1960's foreshadowed Mr. Sharpton's lavish vanity campaign this year. Mr. Rangel sent Powell into involuntary retirement in 1970. A decade ago, Mr. Powell IV tried to avenge his father by challenging Mr. Rangel, but the Congressman easily defeated him.

Now there are hints that Mr. Powell IV, an undistinguished former Council member, may want to have a go at Mr. Rangel again and is eager for Mr. Sharpton's support. In fact, he is supporting Mr. Sharpton's Presidential campaign. So here are a few questions for the would-be Congressman: Do you really believe that Al Sharpton is the best-qualified candidate for President of the United States? Have you asked your favorite son about his close association with anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan and his ilk?

It's pretty clear that Adam Clayton Powell IV and Al Sharpton deserve each other. The people of Harlem deserve better than these two self-appointed activists. What Mr. Sharpton has proven this year, however, is that activism certainly beats working for a living.

It's frightening to consider that Al Sharpton has a measure of credibility in New York's Democratic Party. Perhaps they should look to the class and integrity of Charlie Rangel.

Hope for the Homeless

Over 8,000 families are staying in New York's long-term shelter system, a staggering figure which reflects poorly on the city and doesn't bode well for the future of the thousands of children who are being raised with no idea of what it means to have a home. The Bloomberg administration's new Housing Stability Initiative, which will spend $12 million to help alleviate the roots of homelessness, is a smart move in the right direction.

The city has chosen six neighborhoods where families living on the brink of homelessness tend to reside. Community groups will identify those families most in jeopardy, such as those living doubled-up with relatives, and offer them help in paying rent and avoiding eviction. Family counseling and other social services will also be offered.

Common sense indicates that the best way to deal with homeless families is to keep them from becoming homeless-even a few nights in a shelter can traumatize and stigmatize a family. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his commissioner of homeless services, Linda Gibbs, deserve praise for thinking creatively to help solve a problem that affects all New Yorkers.

But Mr. Buckley and Mr. Will seem to think that their celebrity armors them against such petty concerns. Mr. Will haughtily told The Times , "My business is my business. Got it?" All well and good, but if that's your business, you have no business calling yourself a journalist. And when asked by The Times why he had not disclosed his financial history with Lord Black in a column he wrote for The National Review, Mr. Buckley-who received approximately $200,000 from Hollinger-replied, "I didn't think that had any bearing whatsoever."

It seems statesmen are as easy to purchase as some journalists these days: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger-who gushes on the back of Lord Black's book, "No biography of Roosevelt is more thoughtful or readable"-also served as a paid Hollinger adviser, as well as being a director of the company. Indeed, Mr. Kissinger did quite nicely thanks to Lord Black: Hollinger also paid about $200,000 a year to The National Interest , a publication whose editorial board was co-chaired by Mr. Kissinger and Lord Black. As you can imagine, Hollinger shareholders don't find any of this particularly cute.

It's no wonder that Lord Black-a man who gave up his Canadian citizenship because the Canadian government wouldn't allow him to join the British House of Lords-spent a few bucks courting famous media and political personalities. After all, in addition to Mr. Buckley, Mr. Will and Mr. Kissinger, Lord Black packed Hollinger's informal advisory board with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Paul Volcker and Valery Giscard d'Estaing. This well-compensated board would gather once a year to debate the world's problems-a high-falutin' agenda for a newspaper board, but one that allowed Lord Black to fancy himself a sort of intellectual celebrity. And when he published his 1,360-page Roosevelt biography, he knew just whom to call for a blurb.

Mr. Buckley and Mr. Will should have known better. Both men have had long and illustrious careers and had no need to cozy up to Lord Black, other than for a few dinner parties. And there's not too many of them in Sing-Sing.

Clear Sailing Till Mother's Day

Take a good, long look at that calendar, folks: From now until Mother's Day in May, the weeks are blessedly free of holidays. This only happens once a year, so enjoy it while you can. Just think about it: That means no hauling yourself off to your parents' house, no pretending to be thrilled that your children and grandchildren are coming home for a visit, no scrambled gift-buying and tip-giving. And it just gets better and better: You don't have to spend weekends at your friends' country houses (bad weather, icy roads, annoying and incomprehensible "house rules"); you don't even have to spend weekends at your own country house (face it, you always have a more peaceful time in the city). You don't have to "swing by" friends' boorish holiday parties or make the round of business parties, you don't have to scribble thank-you notes, and you don't have to figure out how long you have to wait before throwing out that stack of holiday cards bearing photos of your friends' adorable children.

But come Mother's Day, this five-month idyll comes to an end, and the intensity builds to a blurred crescendo: After Mother's Day comes Memorial Day, Father's Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Then in quick succession come the Jewish High Holy Days, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Year's (and if you don't spend Christmas and New Year's in St. Bart's, Gstaad or Machu Picchu, don't tell anyone).

And what good do these holidays do for us? If we didn't have them, worker productivity would be up, the G.D.P. would be higher and the dollar would be doing better against the euro.

What about retail sales, you may ask?

Oops. Let us think-we'll get back to you.

In his tumescent 1,280-page doorstop-worthy biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lord Black, a.k.a. Conrad Black, the former Canadian press magnate, member of the House of Lords and recent C.E.O. of Hollinger International, the disintegrating newspaper conglomerate, gives a little less than one page to the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The securities bill," writes Lord Black of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, required "timely reporting on financial performance of listed companies, and prohibited dubious stock market practices that enabled insiders to swindle good-faith public investors."

Perhaps the biographer should be asked to scrawl the lesson of the law 1,000 times on the blackboard. Certainly his hero, President Roosevelt, would not have been sympathetic to the oily escapades of the pretentious windbag and blustering press lord who, rather than being in the position of becoming the new Lord Beaverbrook, will now be defending himself from stockholder suits well into the 21st century, as he is reminded of his international path of corporate miscreancy in the places he littered with deception and greed-New York, London, Toronto, Chicago-and where they have a word for men who swindle, hondle, cadge and cunningly deceive: goniff .

On the surface, Lord Black turned his press holdings into something of an empire in the past decade, controlling London's Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times , the Jerusalem Post and The Spectator, as well as an asteroid belt of media debris that included a rabble of Chicago-area weeklies. He packed his board with chi-chi celebrities, like Henry Kissinger and the right-wing defense expert Richard Perle-the kind of association, one might note, that would have struck President Roosevelt with a kind of horror-on whose ideological escapades, such as Mr. Perle's venture-capital fund Trireme Partners, he allowed Hollinger to shower its financial favors. Indeed, Lord Black was never shy about exploiting Hollinger for his own ends: He used the company's money to acquire the Roosevelt papers for $8 million, providing a handy resource for his long-winded, rehashed biography of F.D.R.

But it was the gnarled network of his finances that was particularly slimy: siphoned millions from the public company, greased favors-all while the company whose figurehead he became buckled under the bulky weight of his preternaturally bloated ego. Lord Black's grotesque, sleazy self-indulgence continued to bilk the shareholders while the price of his debt-ridden corporation plummeted to levels significantly below its initial public offering in 1994. He insulted the very tenets of corporate democracy, mocking and assaulting investors and critics, name-calling his dissident capitalizers as "corporate-governance terrorists."

Yet who, one might ask, was the corporate terrorizer in this case? Lord Black's diverting of funds to the bogus holding company Ravelston Management Inc.-Hollinger paid Ravelston $24 million last year-is a fiscal obscenity. His bluster upon being challenged embodies not just arrogance, but the suspicion of something far more venal. In 2000 and 2001, when Hollinger sold assets for $2.3 billion, Lord Black and his associates were personally given $48 million for non-compete clauses: a proposition ludicrous in function but perplexingly near graft in terms of standard corporate practice. "It's never happened at any large public company that I'm aware of," one Bear Stearns analyst told Fortune .

But that's just the tip of the Hollinger debacle. As board members fled, the pompous Lord Black's darkly threatening rebukes to his critics put him into a corner from which he may not escape, and where his dubious peerage will be of little use. Incensed partners at Tweedy Browne, the investment firm that is Hollinger's second-largest institutional investor, suggest that they will chase Lord Black in court for years to come, while at the same time the S.E.C. has issued subpoenas to Lord Black and Hollinger's other officers and directors. This is not the first time the S.E.C. has shed light on Mr. Black's shady character: The commission charged him with securities fraud in 1982.

If Lord Black is pursued in court by stockholders and the government, it will satisfy the hovering ghost of a biographical subject whose immensity may have inspired him, but whose huge legacy remains far too great and noble for him to comprehend: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his aristocratic lineage, was neither a very rich man nor arrogant when it came to money itself, but rather driven, ethical, democratized, frugal and socially justice-minded-all of which seems to irritate his slippery biographer.

Lord Black skews Franklin Roosevelt's beliefs for his own conservative purposes-there's one ex-President rolling in his Hyde Park grave!-condescending to F.D.R.'s "rather quaint, pseudo-religious notions of the moral duty of tax paying," although they were a central tenet of his convictions. Lord Black stunningly mocks Roosevelt's determination to make the rich pay their taxes as a combination of "naïveté, sanctimony, and political posturing."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a response to this kind of plutocratic self-selection, and it may be instructive to Lord Black to remember it at some point. Look for arrogant evaders of the fiscal law, Roosevelt told his Attorney General, and prosecute "one son of a bitch."

You'll find it on page 420 of Lord Black's book. It's for sale at half-price on the discount table at the Strand Book Store.

Happy Days Aren't Here Again

How's life?

It's a question which is often answered with everything from a shrug of the shoulders to a laundry list of complaints. Depression has been on the rise in America, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry of psychopharmaceutical solutions. Many New Yorkers spend a significant portion of their week just trying to "feel better," shuttling between therapist and gym and acupuncturist and yoga class. And yet, as Gregg Easterbrook documents in his new book, The Progress Paradox , life in the Western world has been steadily improving over the past 50 years. For instance, 70 percent of Americans are now homeowners; 100 years ago, fewer than 20 percent owned a home. Americans in 2003 can expect to live nearly twice as long as they would have in 1900. With longevity has come prosperity: Real income in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1960. And Mr. Easterbrook points out the very obvious-and troubling-fact that Americans are hardly going hungry, but are rather gorging themselves into obesity.

So, with such proof of increased abundance, why aren't people happier? Just 6 percent of Americans call themselves "very happy"; only 60 percent grudgingly admit to being "happy." Mr. Easterbrook concludes that the true causes of inner well-being are to be found in the experiences of generosity, gratitude, forgiveness and positive thinking. Only by helping others, he suggests, can we begin to feel better ourselves.

So the next time you feel like whining about your life, just be happy it's not 1900: You'd likely be poorer and hungrier. Then again, you might be happier.